1,134 AI Workers Petition US to Pace Automated AI
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- Pacing the Frontier petition gathered 1,134 signatures from frontier AI company employees calling on the US government to help deliberately pace automated AI development.
- OpenAI's Jakub Pachocki and John Schulman were among the named signatories, with Bloomberg Law confirming participation from staff at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
- Anthropic formally backed the petition per RuntimeWire, while other companies surface in coverage through individual employee signatures rather than institutional endorsement.
- The letter specifically targets "automated AI" and automated model development per The Verge and SiliconANGLE—not AI development broadly—narrowing what regulators are being asked to constrain.
- Mark Zuckerberg and Meta issued a separate response per the New York Times, blasting the centralization of AI power—a counterpoint the dominant "pace AI" framing across other coverage does not engage with.
- US politicians including Rep. Ted Lieu and New York Governor Kathy Hochul publicly engaged with the petition on X, per posts aggregated in Techmeme's coverage links.
Why it matters: The letter targets 'automated AI' specifically—not AI broadly—giving regulators a narrower, more technically tractable policy target than a blanket slowdown mandate. With Anthropic institutionally backing it while peers' employees signed individually, the petition creates an unusual labor-management alignment on regulation, while Meta's Zuckerberg pushes the opposing critique about AI centralization.
